How should we handle the fact that new players taking over the role of old gods can't be expected to know that god's past interaction with our characters?

I saw that Pandora came back, and was a little puzzled by this question, as Tiax has a somewhat unpleasant past with Pandora relating to a few specific incidents. If at some point I interact with Pandora, and do so with their past interaction in mind, the player behind Pandora might be more than a little lost. On the other hand, if I ignore it, I'll have discarded events which played a pretty formative role in the way Tiax views other divine in certain situations.

Has anyone dealt with this sort of thing before?

That aspect of things is easy. You just write your interaction like the sections that TV writers use in the previouslies. "Ha, Foul Goddess of Chaos, no doubt You thought You had gotten away with Your evil plan to abduct my child and then paint my toenails red, but now You have returned, I shall be sure to thwart You!".

You can use a public post to grandstandingly give the new player the background, messages or whatever. You just have to be Basil Exposition for a bit. If the new player has got their head screwed on, it'll work quite well.

Yeah, I was considering an executive summary type message to send if our paths cross in such a way that it would be important.

Interesting dilemma indeed.

If anything I would expect them to of read past messages + history or maybe have some sort of log file or something for such a case.
Notes from the old god maybe?

If they have nothing, it's a tricky situation to play with.
Don't want to start up a personal vendetta concerning some history if that player has no idea wtf you're on about or doing. Then again if they have some notes or something and know fully about it it would be dissapointing to see you not pick it up.

Not sure what to suggest about it really.

It's not reasonable to expect the new player to have that level of detail. I'd rather they spent their time generally learning the role/how to be a God than wade through the no doubt thousands of messages the previous player received and try and cross-reference posts to work out their relationship to any given player. They should have a working knowledge of their order members level of commitment/devotion and a sound knowledge of the realm and the God's broad storyline.

Everything else they can/should re-create or ad-lib.

You could always shoot them an email explaining things, assuming it really is a large enough part of your roleplay. Since the transfer of players is an OOC concept, keeping the player of the Divine up-to-date with potentially important things via email or some other OOC medium should be acceptable.

There's no guarantee that they'll accept it as fact, but it can't hurt to try.


This should only really be done if it really is significant though. This is not an excuse for people to start emailing with "lol hi pandora IF THAT IS YOUR REAL NAME remember that one time where i was doing something in that one room and you came and a butterfly attacked and i was like oh no pandora save me and you st uck my in the grotto that was great i hope we can rp again sometimes we were good friends before you gone and come back!!!!"

Agree with Hie and Tene. It's just one of those things where you have to make do as best you can. Hopefully the new god-player is open to getting background filler. My guess is that the vast majority of them would be, based on my interactions with a very limited set of players who went the immortal path. It's tough to try to make it a pure IC RP thing. As Hie noted, change of players is an OOC thing so a reasonable amount of OOC is appropriate.

And as a side note, I much prefer igniting old gods rather than trying to cook up new ones (Babel being a notable exception).

That was the most hilarious thing I've read in a while. Kudos to you, good sir.

Try to sum up your past experiences and mail it to roleplaying@achaea.com, not 100% sure about the address though.

Edit:
What Hieyoko said

Also, I would guess it's okay to assume if a Divine has been uninterested in the affairs of mortals for a bit, they would probably have forgotten much of it (in an RP sense) because well, we're bugs to them or something. Still, if she's up for it, great to rekindle old rivalries.

I figure that it's not worth sending an email unless I'm sure it's going to come up. Can't have everyone who's ever interacted with an old god sending messages and emails.

Might be worth having a little summary pre-written, so that if it comes up unexpectedly, I can just pop it into a message, so she'll be a little up to speed.

Trevize had some minor interactions with Pandora, nothing big, so I just had him blow it off upon her return off as 'she probably won't remember something like that after this long' and said 'hi, glad you're back!' and left it at that. Unless it's something major, in which case you have an excuse for making her aware somehow, I'd recommend doing the same.

Do not inundate new deities with OOC messages. It would be the very, very very rare mortal whose interaction would be significant enough for a new incarnation of a deity to remember from the old, and such would tend to be inferred either from current position, or relatively important news posts. For the most part, it is best to assume that the deity has forgotten nearly everything about specific mortals. Feel free to prompt, but do not necessarily expect them to reply.

A new god has quite a bit of old information to process as is, as well as the formidable task of putting his or her own personal stamp on the role. Expecting a deity to act to each mortal exactly the same, prompting or not, adds an additional level of stress onto an already fairly stressful job. If you want a deity to stick around, as I'm sure you would like them to do, try not to add OOC stress that isn't specifically necessary!

wow, that's awesome.

Here gais! I'm the new pandora, but anything and everything that we have done in the past, you can't mention it, no no no no no, because I don't want any stress on my life, and that's why I became a god in the first place. So if I ever did anything with you, no matter how big it was in your characters roleplay/life, don't mention it, cause I will zap you. And then he will zap you. And then I will zap you again

gj

I don't think it's unreasonable to ask players not to spam new gods with ooc messages... why does everyone think they're so important anyway that they get angry if the god doesn't remember every little interaction with you?

From the sounds of it, it wasn't a little interaction.

That wasn't directed at Tiax (or anyone really).

I had this problem with Thoth, every Thoth was different.

Well, it could be a little interaction for the god while also being a major one for Tiax. In fact, one would rather expect that even events which were major and formative for mere mortals would be rather minor and forgetable for the gods.

You don't have to pretend it never happened. You just have to expect the divine to have forgotten about it. So Tiax could keep being mad at/wary of Pandora (or whatever his actual attitude is), and if Pandora has no idea wtf his problem is, then he might be annoyed or offended by that. That sounds like perfectly consistent roleplay, which retains the incident as an important part of Tiax's past, without unnecessarily burdening the new player behind Pandora.

You would hope so.

Who are you again?

Just put yourself in Roy's shoes, and the Divine in Xykon's.

/\ Perfect way to look at it.

Vastar did it pretty well, seems he was a god of Scholars first, now it's this whole "Warriors of Freedom" thing going on. Of corse, Lord Vastar's Order was completely dormant beforehand...

Edit: And I mean completely empty.

Seems a massive bandwagon has taken place in the last 2 weeks.

Yeah, the tenets are a pretty general thing, but carrying it out will be fun.

Kill the old gods, and have new gods supplant their domains through IG events.

Bingo.

If we're using the Greek or Roman equivalency of Divine control that we seem to be, that's a lot easier than super duper amnesia. They don't have to deal with an old Order with old expectations or old alignments. They can set up their ethos and Order according to the person behind the Divine's particular twist on the ideals that they claim to emulate rather than juggle a backlog of experiences from the rest of achaea.

Umm hello?

Gaia> Demeter> Melantha

Now if only we could manage to keep them. Srsly.. Matt.. pay your gods!

You lose a lot of potentially good stuff if you do that though. I'd have no problem with the ritual slaughter of Kastalia, but if you're talking about a Thoth or a Twilight or a Sartan, that's a different kettle of fish.

Those Gods should be paid to stay away from Achaea, seriously.

Nature gods

Why pay them to do what they're already doing? No one's seen Melantha in like six RL months or more..

I think it would be a good idea to do some Divine Consolodations... have some of the active divine Absorb the realms of the inactive/dissappeared Divine.

For Example, have Ourania absorb Twilights Essence, and become the Goddess of Night
Have um.... some nature deity Absorb Scarlatti/Kastalia and become the God of Merriment who lives in/watches over the forest.
Have Aeon be absorbed by Ourania (as an alternative to above) and become the Goddess of Fate or something.
Probably can consolidated Melantha/Vastar, Ourania/Vastar, Neraeos/Kastalia, Mithraea/Vastar, etc....

I also like the ideas of new gods just coming and and wiping out the old ones. Old orders can be wiped out by new gods coming in to take over the realm of gods long past. It would remove stagnation from achaea... and pretty much FORCE people to roleplay in a way. Having old gods come back is a bit of a problem.

Imagine the Nature god I mentioned coming into the picture.

Ale: Scarlatti is the God of the Arts.
Nature god (Lets call him Dionys): Haha, really? Nope, not anymore. He's gone... didn't he marry some mortal chick? Not cool.

Ale: Well, I'll still worship him. He's the real god of the Arts!

Dionys: haha, you're a funny girl. Tell you what, you go and worship the old guy, while I'm living it up with the artists of today... and Scarlatti's essence. How do you have an Order without any essence?

Ale: Um... well...

Dionys: Look, you can have a Scarlattan cult if you want, but I'm what's up now. I don't care if you revere the old guy or not, so long as you don't dis me... then I'll have to shut you down. But if you want to move on and leave the dead buried, then I'll let you into my order, and we can make progress from there. Got it?

This.

Twilight, for instance, would add a lot of RP flavor to Achaea if done right, especially with things as tense as they are right now.

Darkness is easily one of the more interesting philosophies, or could be, if they ditch the BS Summum ripoff and go for a Machiavellianesque, advance-at-any-cost sort of way.

That history is more of an impediment than a benefit. It restricts the new player to the style of another player rather than allowing him/her to grow into their own divine style. It's also impossible for a new divine player to know every detail of the old divine's interactions, which can cause problems. I don't feel that the history and Order infrastructure is worth those sorts of hindrances.

I understand that for a 'god' it's much easier and more fun to create a new role instead of trying to imitate an old god. And it's obvious that a new person playing an old god will never meet all expectations.

But I don't think killing off all gods that go dormant is a good solution. All it does is discourage consistent roleplay, because whenever your patron goes dormant you're forced to decide: Either turn your character (who might have defined itself strongly by her or his order) around completely every time it happens, go on a "I refuse to accept it and I believe god X is still alive and I will prove it!" trip (which I personally find somewhat boring and overdone), or just never go into an order again (which takes away quite a lot of potential fun).

The way it currently is (see Pandora's return) just switching alliances whenever your god becomes dormant already is somewhat encouraged. If all old gods were killed off (after sometimes only having been active for very short times), this would lead to people switching between orders as much as autoclass made people start jumping between classes. Patron is slightly less active? Quit your order. New interesting god appears? Join his order. Sure, that can be fun, but personally, I think there's also something to be said for consistency. I don't think it should be discouraged that much.

As for the problem of new players of old gods not living up to the expectations of the roles they take: Personally I don't mind that much. I can realize this fact as an OOC matter, but still pretend that it's the same god IC, generously ignoring the inconsistencies that -will- come up. I'd much rather have this (along with dealing with dormant phases of a god) than joining a new order every two months.

I agree with Iocun. One of the basic requirements to make Achaean roleplay really fun/interesting is your own suspension of disbelief.

It's not easy to just come up with your own religion, especially considering that there's so many religions in Achaea already, and they get pissy if you steal one of their buzzwords. (Nerai 'Equilibrium', Mitran 'Perfection', Daedalan 'Balance') Were I to become a god, I would much rather take up the mantle of an existing Lord (That I mostly agreed with, of course) and fine-tune his realm or ideals to mine, rather than spend weeks (or months!) trying to come up with a completely new religion and back story to justify my existence.

Sure, some of the grizzled ancient ordermembers may take offense to this, but who knows what I experienced in the black Void before my return. Perhaps I, the Lord, have simply come to understand [insert realm] better than you mortals.

Pandora's return has been done well, she cleared out the inactives, but she's taken back a lot of the core and done things in as consistent a manner as possible. I haven't seen anyone in the order or pre-order yet who was not in some way interested in Pandora, or had their characters shaped by her in some way, before her return.

I'd be Twilight if I had the chance.

Twilight's order was half OOC fanclub. I don't think that would go very smoothly.

and the other half were players that were genuinely interested in the teachings...

What better way to announce your triumphant return then booting everyone and starting fresh?

"If you truly understand the tenets of X you will apply to join with Me once more, Mortal"*


*This is why I will not go Celani or be a God

It's a bit late but I figure I'd post my opinion on the topic.

I think the constantly changing Gods is pretty lame. I understand they're new players and it gives the Divine a fresh start but it seems a bit ridiculous to have so many new ones coming and going. With Pandora, I think the transition was fairly believable. The child Goddess of Mischief forgetting everything? While it -is- a cop-out, I'd say it's not that terribly awful. A God like Twilight forgetting everything, I think would be a bit more of a stretch. From inklings I've heard regarding Twilight's mishmash of an Order, I'd say revamping him would probably be necessary. Either a new God or a specific RP reason for forgetting everything might be necessary.

You don't have to admit you have forgot anything as Twilight. You can just always give very mysterious and deep answers, which don't actually say anything and completely hide the fact that you're utterly clueless. And in case of need, you can always just tell the mortals that whatever they remember was a mere illusion.

Also known as "the Xadzia approach".

Me: Xadzia, I need you to change this in the pre-order clan
Xadzia: As a tree blows, so must a shoe hover in the breeze.
Me: No, seriously. I need to be able to induct.
Xadzia: Deep are the tree mysteries which flunge in the whibbles.
Me: Are you retarded?
Xadzia: That is a question of perspective, padawan.
Me: -qq-

While I do not have much credibility around here, I will say that I experienced firsthand the problem with ooc players of gods going inactive.

I worked really hard on one of my characters to get into a Divine's order, which was probably one of the harder to ever get into. I had a message from the semi-inactive leader of the Divine's order telling me explicitly I was in and would be officially ordered soon when the Divine had time.

The Divine then proceeded to go completely inactive, along with the leader, and the subsequent Divine implemented in the old one's place obviously had no idea of the intent/commitment made by the old character.

Quite frustrating.

this

Wouldn't it be more justified for the sake of roleplay to have one God have a son/daughter and have him/her overthrow them? I mean I understand that in the realistic aspect that a human can't dedicate themselves completely but that a God is forever, but plenty of Gods have been slain by their spiteful children.